Friday, April 22, 2016
17
BRIGHTON AND HOVE INDEPENDENT
Opinion
A Radical View
with Tony Greenstein
I have opposed anti-Semitism all my life Imagine, you are accused of an offence, the nature of which is not disclosed.
Your guilt is assumed and having reached a verdict there then begins a trial! You can choose between either Kafka’s Trial or the trial of Alice in Wonderland. Such has been my experience for the last month. On March 18th I was suspended from the Labour Party. When I first joined, in the late 1970s, it took 15 years before I was suspended. Now it’s taken just three months! The Labour Party’s Compliance Unit have refused to divulge the reasons for my suspension other than that it is for comments I have apparently made. But even though they cannot tell me, details were leaked to that well known supporter of the Labour Party, The Daily Telegraph. It would appear that my suspension relates to my views on Israel. I am one of many Jewish people who don’t accept that the Israeli state represents them. In particular we take exception to the treatment of the Palestinians. Jews have historically been the victims of
Tony Greenstein
murderous racism. The conclusions we draw from that legacy is that racism is wrong, whoever practices it and whoever is the victim. So when Israel segregates Arab and Jewish women in maternity units and offers Jewish students in university
accommodation the option of not having to share with Arabs we object in the same way as we would object if white students in this country were offered the option of not sharing with Black or Asian students. To raise these questions however is to invite the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ and in the case of Jewish critics of Israel and Zionism, the movement that created the Israeli state, we are termed traitors and ‘self-haters’. The accusation of being a traitor assumes that Jews owe a loyalty to the Israeli state. After the murder of four Jews in Paris last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that he was the representative of Jews throughout the world. Most Jews reject this. The idea that Jews have a dual loyalty, to the state they live in as well as Israel, is a deeply anti-Semitic one. In today’s Labour Party there is a battle being fought out between supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and what was New Labour. Unfortunately ‘anti-Semitism’ is being used as a weapon in this struggle and there is a deliberate attempt to conflate antiZionism and anti-Semitism. It is therefore ironic that a Jewish
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anti-Zionist is being suspended for antiSemitism. I have opposed anti-Semitism all my life but I refuse to turn a blind eye to racism in Israel. Anti-Semitism is racism against Jews not opposition to racism against Palestinians. False accusations of anti-Semitism are like the boy who cried wolf. People become so immune to cries of anti-Semitism that they ignore it when it actually occurs. Today more and more Jewish people are speaking out against an Israel where the Right and the far-Right dominate. Where legislation is now targeted at human rights organisations who are demonised for revealing uncomfortable truths like the soldiers group, Breaking the Silence or B’Tselem. Last Saturday the District Labour Party meeting passed a motion calling for my suspension to be lifted. No doubt Labour’s bureaucrats will ignore it because the concept of natural justice is alien to them. Even in the Court of the Star Chamber the accused were told of what they were being accused.